Rachel Maddow: It Shouldn’t Be So Easy to Start Wars

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, author of the new book Drift; reports from near Baghdad, Iraq, August 2010. Photo: MSNBC

Let’s be blunt. What does a left-wing cable TV news show host know about war?

Rachel Maddow is up front that she’s a novice. “I’m no military expert and I’m no war expert,” the host of the popular eponymous MSNBC show concedes to Danger Room. But that hasn’t stopped Maddow, who knows a few things about American politics, from writing a provocative new book that raises uncomfortable questions about how the U.S. decides to go to war in the 21st century.

Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power, published today, argues that the U.S. has wandered dangerously from the Founding Fathers’ vision of a commander-in-chief constrained by a Congress that openly debates and decides what wars to fight. Institutional constraints placed on the presidency after the Vietnam war — the congressional War Powers Act; the end of the draft; Army Gen. Creighton Abrams’ famous doctrine that the reserves must be called up to fight so the country feels invested in its wars — have been eroded or ignored.

“Rational political actors, acting rationally to achieve rational (if sometimes dumb) political goals,” Maddow writes, “have attacked and undermined our constitutional inheritance from men like Madison.” The result has been a drift in warfighting, like a decade-long war in Afghanistan that no one seems to know how to end.

“The way to fix that is to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” Maddow says. “There shouldn’t be tax cuts in wartime. Wars should be paid for through something other than an emergency budget supplemental bill. We shouldn’t be shielded from seeing American casualties, whether it’s soldiers who are wounded or remains when they’re repatriated from the United States. We shouldn’t be shielded from this stuff. And we are shielded because politicians didn’t want to explain the costs and debate them. There ought to be civilian political accountability for what we do in wartime.”

Maddow’s book depends significantly on the perspectives of the Founding generation. And all American political movements claim the Founders would have done things their way. But why care about what the Founders thought about foreign policy? The world they confronted and the America they created are vastly different than what exists now.

“The process is important. A lot of thought went into creating it,” Maddow replies. “And we’ve dismantled what used to be an appropriate process with much less thought.”

That leads Maddow into a bit of formalism. Drift is very clear about the constitutional processes Maddow wants U.S. politicians to follow before launching a war. But aside from putting forth the truism that wars usually don’t turn out well, it’s practically agnostic on what wars are worth fighting, or what the national interest is. Readers don’t get a Maddow Doctrine from Drift. What are the dangers in today’s world that the U.S. military ought to confront? If the 9/11 Era is beset by drift, what would a sober alternative look like that keeps national security on course?

Maddow makes no apologies for writing a book essentially about Constitutional and legislative procedure for declaring wars. “I really want to focus on whether or not we are capable of making good decisions about when and how we use force, and whether or not our decisions about the military are democratically made. Whether or not we have political control of the type the founders envisioned over whether and how we use the military,” she says. “The national interest is much more located in the process than we’ve been willing to grapple with. We’ve been willing to let the process change radically and rather quickly as if it has no bearing on whether or not our national interest is served.”

That isn’t Maddow’s only punt. The book basically stops before 9/11, so it effectively gives both George W. Bush and Barack Obama a pass. “This transformation of America’s procedural relationship to the use of military force was sort of complete by 2001,” she says.

“We made changes between Vietnam and 2001 that made what we did after 2001 make sense, and that doesn’t feel right to the American people,” Maddow continues. “Waging two of the longest land wars in American history simultaneously and not noticing when one of them ends? Having only one percent of the population fighting these things and doing three, four, five deployments? That doesn’t feel right to people.”

To Maddow, the right process for going to war looks roughly like this. The president puts forth a case to the nation about why launching a given war is appropriate and necessary. Congress rips into the case relentlessly, isolating good arguments and jettisoning bad ones, with each legislator going on record with his or her perspective. Somewhere in the process, an endgame for the war becomes clear to everyone. Congress votes to formally declare war, or against formally declaring war. The president abides by the decision either way.

If any modern presidency and Congress followed that example, it would be George H.W. Bush during the First Gulf War. Still, Maddow spends many pages taking the George H.W. Bush administration to task for not immediately requesting a formal declaration of war from Congress.

Maddow’s presumption is that Congress will restrain presidents from launching dumb-ass wars. That’s definitely what the Founders believed. But is it true anymore? Today’s legislators often sound more bellicose than presidents, as the recent congressional debates over Libya, Syria and Iran demonstrate.

“I think that’s a direct result of the fact that Congress presumes it has no actual power for whether or not we go to war,” Maddow replies. “The point of congressional responsibility for war-making is actually about responsibility, not a relationship to the presidency. It’s about whether members of Congress think it is their job to make the decision to go to war. When members of Congress get up from their hind legs and take on that responsibility, we end up having big, robust, engaged debates when people are forced to make good arguments and bad arguments are ferreted out and ridiculed.”

The book has some inaccuracies. (Retired Adm. John Poindexter isn’t a Marine; the Air Force’s next-generation bomber is supposed to be optionally manned, not really “remote controlled,” and it won’t only carry nuclear weapons; Native American tribes might be surprised to learn that “Jeffersonian prudence [against war] held sway in this country for a century and a half.”) And liberals will find all their familiar villains, including Ronald Reagan, Dick Cheney and DynCorp.

Drift also has a problem with snark. On TV, Maddow mixes sarcasm into her invective. It’s fun to watch and it keeps her occasional diatribes from falling into painful liberal earnestness. But it doesn’t work as well in a book. Reading Maddow describe a wasteful, expensive sewage system the U.S. built for Iraq as a “shit processing plant that didn’t process shit” — that’s funny. The first time. By the time she’s questioning the disbursement of homeland security dollars by writing, “Take that, Oyster Bay,” or giving the Stockpile Life Extension Program for nuclear weapons the acronym SchLEP — OK, we get it.

Still, the book asks fundamental questions about the process by which the U.S. now goes to war that pretty much never get asked by the media — which, in turn, exacerbates the institutional drift Maddow identifies. Cable news hosts do not typically urge views to “think creatively” about how to roll back the bloated security state created after 9/11.

“There are decisions to be made that each one wouldn’t by itself be earth-shaking,” Maddow says. “Have the military peel its own potatoes. Don’t operate the drones in secret — especially so we can debate openly whether we should be using them. Don’t use the CIA as a branch of the military and use it as an intelligence agency. Stop maintaining a Cold War-era hair-trigger stockpile of nuclear weapons.”

But put them all together, and Maddow has a program for rather radically reshaping the American security apparatus. Not bad for someone who says she’s “no military expert.”